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Nuclear firms want special treatment

By Rob Edwards in Vienna

THE nuclear industry is calling for the world energy market to be biased in its favour to ensure that nuclear power has a future.

At a conference organised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna last week, industry leaders admitted that in a free market, building new reactors will not be an economic proposition in most countries for the next twenty years.

Gerald Clark, secretary-general of the Uranium Institute, which represents nearly 80 nuclear corporations worldwide, suggested that the market should be rigged “so that it delivers the result we want”. Introducing a carbon tax on coal and oil plants to reduce global warming would be one way of making the market back nuclear power. Another possibility would be to relax controls on radioactive emissions. “Maybe they are too tight,” Clark told New Scientist.

Sam Thompson, acting director-general of the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency, told the conference that the free market emphasised short-term costs and benefits. “There can be no doubt that for some years to come it will be difficult to make an economic case for new investment in nuclear generation if the bases for comparison of fuel costs are not radically altered.”

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Hermann Wagner, a German science ministry official who chaired an IAEA expert group on future energy demand at the conference, admitted that growth projections for the nuclear industry have been overoptimistic. This is partly because of the “rigid, vigorous and deep-rooted problem of public acceptance” which, he said, could not be overcome by any technological arguments.

Hans Blix, the director-general of the IAEA, pointed out that the industry’s vision of a nuclear fuel cycle in which plutonium created in reactors is separated by reprocessing for use in fast-breeder reactors “has not become a commercial reality”. He said world nuclear capacity will only be 380 gigawatts in the year 2000—less than half the minimum predicted in 1980.

Delegates were pessimistic about public opposition to nuclear power. “We are only one accident away from being dead,” said the conference’s scientific secretary, Peter Jelinek-Fink.

Nevertheless, delegates argued that carbon taxes and other controls on the energy market would allow a major expansion of nuclear power. A “medium” scenario, highlighted by Jelinek-Fink in his summing up, would require 1000 large new reactors—including fast-breeders—by 2050.